Dracut sometimes confuses EFI partition with root filesystem

[Alexander Thomas]

On Wed, 3 Mar 2021 at 11:51, Alexander Thomas
<alexander.thomas at esaturnus.com> wrote:
>
> The EFI vfat filesystem does not have a label at all. Maybe giving it
> an explicit label will avoid this problem, but this is just a hunch.
> The randomness makes it hard to apply trial-and-error on this, so it
> would be nice if someone could shine some more light on this issue.

We have now patched fai-cd in our build to add "-n System" to the
mkfs.vfat invocation. "System" seems to be the label Windows typically
uses for the ESP, so it should be a safe choice (unlike "EFI" which
may trigger some bugs according to the Archlinux wiki).
Now only time will tell if this avoids this rare bug. It does seem
plausible that there is an oversight somewhere with two arrays whose
entries get out of sync if a volume has no label, but I'm not going to
excavate the dracut sources for this…

Kind regards,
Alexander